About Me

"Oddments" are strange vegetation (fruit, leaves, lichen and others) that grow in the Hedge, the barrier between the Mortal World and Faerie. Unless otherwise noted, the oddments spring directly out of my own imagination, sparking a given blog entry. (Hey, there have been worse writing prompts...) I'm borrowing the term from "Changeling: the Lost", a role-playing game from White Wolf Game Studios that came out in 2007.

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Monday, December 28, 2015

I'm planning, as so many others before me have done, to make some major changes with the new year. I hope to bolster my chances of success by planning, inasmuch as such a thing can be done with my work schedule.

First things first: my goals.1. To set up a regular meditation/exercise practice.
2. To set up a regular writing practice.
3. To brush up on my Japanese-language studies.
4. To learn a new skill: basic electronics.

The fun thing about these four goals is that they are actually very simple with the materials I have close to hand. Meditation, obviously, can be done anywhere that I can remain still and mostly undisturbed, but it's more effective if done after some kind of physical workout. Fine; I've got just enough unoccupied floorspace in my little room to manage.
Bonus: I can fulfill some requirements to earn my White Belt in Hoshinjutsu via their distance learning program!
Writing, likewise. All I need is a pen and paper, though a keyboard and computer of one sort or another is definitely the way to produce something legible.
Japanese: I've got at least three different audio-programs available within arm's reach of where I'm typing, with online study-aids available wherever I have Internet access.
Basic electronics comes from an educational kit, but it's got online video support and it's still something I've been meaning to study for a while.

My plan is to alternate between spending an hour a day on each of these tasks over a five-day workweek (a la high school) and then spending a full day of the week on each topic. I'll borrow a writing trick for efficiency, breaking all the study and work into 25-minutes-on, 5-minutes-off for either 60 minutes or 8 hours, and see how well it all comes together. Maybe I'll add an additional subject on the fifth hour/day. We'll see...

Saturday, October 31, 2015

Hello, Ms. Swift.
Thank you for joining me in my little corner of cyberspace. Please make yourself comfortable. I certainly won't blame you if you don't stay long.
I had to look up the lyrics to the song to make sense of the video. What I seemed to hear during the first watch-through was a repetitive complaint of betrayal, directed at either the dark-haired woman who kicked your character (may I refer to her as "Jane", for brevity's sake?) out of the window at the beginning the video, or Mr. X, the featured rap-artist (presumably portraying Jane's boyfriend). With the lyrics, I was able to understand that Jane was explaining that the betrayal had left her in profound pain, and that forgiving the betrayer was not going to be possible.

To be fair, I'm turning 45 on 30 Nov 2015, so my ears are probably not longer sharp enough to pick up certain details from the audio track. I've also never had a falling-out with anyone so profound that I felt the need to go through the kind of "training montage" that Jane endured during the main "body" of the video, so I freely admit a lack of comprehension of that aspect of the story.

If you're still with me, I do have a few questions.
First, I understand that the "elite secret sisterhood" motif was meant to symbolize that the betraying woman was once Jane's most trusted friend. Given the resources that Jane clearly can draw upon (those experts training her in all manner of mayhem won't come cheap, either in money or favors), is there any particular reason why a high-level operative such as her wouldn't bother to investigate why the betrayal took place at all?
Second, who are the people smoking cigars while sitting around the table monitoring Jane? Are they her bosses or the ones who inspired the betrayal?
Third, the lucite car mock-up you shared with Mr. X was admittedly a very cool visual, but what was its purpose in the context of the video? (And does it seem like it designed with a right-hand drive?)
Fourth, I understand that the song isn't meant to be "interactive", in the sense that Jane isn't interested in hearing the betrayer's response (given that the lyrics clearly state that the betrayer doesn't care about Jane's feelings), so why is Jane even bothering trying to express her feelings at all?
Finally, the end fight scene is choreographed to set up the audience-expectations for a climactic battle, where all of Jane's new skills are put to the test. So why did the video end with what looks like the beginning of a Three Stooges slap-fest? Is it meant to imply that both Jane and the betrayer are so emotionally distraught that they regress to junior-high-level fighting instincts?

In the end, I found the video to be a visual treat, with Jane building up her rage at the betrayal and channeling it into making herself into an even more dangerous "combat machine", but I felt disappointed by the ending.

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

Depression, especially chronic depression, seems to be something that either you understand because you have experienced it, or you cannot understand because your "blue funks" have never lasted more than a day or so.
I am in the first category, and I envy those in the second.
Trying to describe it is mostly an exercise in futility, but here's my latest attempt.
Find a gym with a special kind of track. It's kind of like a fifteen-foot-wide wooden bowl, and the idea is for you to run in circles around it. It's based on the same tricks of physics that let motorcycles ride upside down on the inside of large steel cages, though I've never heard of any human with the leg-strength or stamina to let them pull that off. Anyway, the workout this track provides gets progressively worse the faster you run. As you accelerate, you can run higher up the side of the bowl, but your own inertia pushes you harder against the track. Most models have lines on the sides to tell you how much 'gravity' you're inflicting on yourself, based on how high up the side you are.
Run a few laps, see if you can get up to 2.5 gees, and pay attention to how it feels.
Now stop, stand in the middle of the track, and imagine that you're still feeling that 2.5 gees pulling you down.
Go ahead and fight it. Remember what it felt like to move from 1 gee to 1.5, then to 2, then to 2.5. Try to imagine what it would be like to go faster, to feel even more gravity pulling down on every part of you.
For you fitness buffs, who take that sort of thing as a challenge, you're missing the point. Try imagining those gee-forces pulling on you every waking moment. It's worse than "The Wall" experienced by long-distance runners; that's just your body telling you that it's run out of freely-accessible carbohydrates to burn for fuel, and now it's started to burn through your reserves of stored fat. As I understand the phenomenon, it's possible for runners to train themselves not to react emotionally to it, but there's no way to avoid the discomfort.
Depression is like gee-forces that never give up; your muscles never strengthen enough to stand up to them because they never get the rest they need to repair the damage.
Depression is like the Wall that you cannot burn through, no matter how hard you push.
Depression is a collection of different things that science is only now beginning to understand, and I pray to whatever gods there may be that I live long enough to avail myself of the new treatments just being popularized.
But depression is as patient as the oblivion whose clothing it has borrowed, and as merciless as gravity.
Those of you who have never felt it, count your blessings.
Those of you, my brothers and sisters in suffering, who understand... I pray that you continue to find the drips and crumbs of hope you need each day.

Wednesday, June 17, 2015

"It's a dangerous business, Frodo: going out your front door. You don't keep your head, there's no telling where you could end up." - Bilbo Baggins, The Fellowship of the Ring

I'm impoverished. Not merely for lack of funds, but from a lack of imagination, and of trust in myself. The Romantic ideal holds that all anyone... boy or girl, man or woman... ever need do to find adventure, fame, fortune and a Place In The World, is simple: pack a bag, walk out of one's home, and keep walking.
The riddle should be easily solved on the face of it: nothing worth having can be obtained by remaining within the familiar. Therefore, one must leave as much of it behind as possible in order to find something uniquely one's own. The warnings against the practice work on the metaphorical level, as well: if you don't know what you're doing, you could get lost or hurt or robbed or otherwise come home empty-handed, assuming that there's a home for you when you do come back.

But without risk, without testing one's skills as a way of testing one's resolve and character, what is human life but a series of cages?

Should I divest myself of every material item, save those which I can carry easily (amounting to absolutely no more than, say, forty pounds in all) and Seek My Fortune at random? Or is there some middle ground, perhaps choices unique to me, that may be more effective?

I have previously fantasized about suicide in many different ways. It could even be said that I avoided that end through the simple expedient of an inability to choose from many possible methods. Simply moving until all strength to continue is exhausted seems like an over-extended way of doing exactly that. Ironically, not moving in the sense of remaining precisely within my "rut" of sleep, work, eat, repeat until death, could result in a life very similar.

"If your life were made into a book, would anyone read it?" This sentence frequently sees use as a way to goad the listeners into taking risks or attempting something new. The technique fails to move me because I have no interest in entertaining those who follow with the story of my life; I will, after all, be dead and unable to appreciate their responses, positive or negative or even merely confused. On the other hand, asking if I am satisfied with my life as I have lived it offers very little motivation, either; while the question requires a certain degree of reflection, it does not provoke action, either to continue support for the current pattern or to set up a new one.

The modern phenomenon of a "midlife crisis" usually includes something of a set script, in which the sufferer randomly abandons certain elements or the totality of the previous external existence in hopes of achieving something more satisfying. It can be as minimal as purchasing a motorcycle (as a symbol of "individual freedom" or at least changing previous habits) or as extensive as faking one's own death and beginning an entire new life, complete with a new spouse and possibly children. The Romans believed that the entire body renewed itself every seven years; the Japanese artist commonly known as "Hokusai" held a funeral for his previous self on his birthday and chose a new name and identity for the subsequent year. Perhaps this could be the beginning of a useful answer?

Sunday, June 14, 2015

There's a wonderful webcomic based on the protagonist's extremely non-literal search for pieces of his own mind. It's called "Alpha-Flag". One of the more interesting details is that the protagonist's "missing pieces" are all given names based on the phonetic alphabet; his lost self-confidence, his only companion, is called "Charlie".

There is at least one short story that may or may not have anything to do with the main narrative, whose title inspired this post:
http://joncairns.net/AlphaFlag/wordpress/?p=1112
Frankly, I've lived so much of my life alone and forgotten, or at least ignored, so the prospect of dying under those conditions doesn't bother me all that much. Have I gotten to this place because I'm so afraid of emotionally investing in other people? Or because I don't know how to find those in whom I can emotionally invest and who will do so to the same degree to me that I do to them?
It's probably got something to do with my poor track-record of self-acceptance. One of my previous therapists gave me a handout, some photocopied pages from a book called "The Principle of Self-Acceptance". In it, the author proposes that true self-acceptance is the absolute foundation for self-esteem and, ultimately, all healthy psychological states. It is defined as "my refusal to be in an adversarial relationship with myself".
I didn't read the handout when my therapist gave it to me, and I probably would have forgotten it if it hadn't somehow drifted to the top of the pile of clutter in my room.
"I cannot be truly for myself, cannot build self-esteem, if I cannot accept myself."
That's the last sentence in the handout. The rest of the handout talks about the need to accept all my thoughts, feelings, desires, actions and dreams as an expression of who and what I am at the time that these things took place.
Which would be fine, except that so many of all these things are simply not acceptABLE. I don't want to accept that I thought about killing myself or someone else. I don't want to accept that I feel like a waste of a life. I don't want to accept that I desire to make the pain stop by either running away from the rest of humanity and (briefly) living alone in the middle of the nearest uninhabitable wasteland. I don't want to accept that my actions form an almost schitzophrenic split between self-preservation and self-destruction. I don't want to accept that my dreams of financial security and emotional fulfillment are beyond my reach.
I judge myself unworthy of continued existence, yet I cannot match the courage of my convictions with actions OR rejection of this self-destructive pattern to make something better of myself.
I am too damaged to be anything more but I am not damaged enough that killing myself quickly is a viable option. So I kill myself slowly, through neglect; I will never make enough money to afford health care, and the mental health care system will not accept me until I am truly destitute... by which time I hope to be sufficiently ill that medical science cannot save me.

Thursday, June 11, 2015

Right now, I'm basically stuck at home. I quit my previous job, thinking that I could just jump right into the swing of things with a new one that was already in the bag; papers signed, i.d.'s copied, the works. Come to find out that I still have to wait another week or three for a background check to work its way through the bowels of bureaucracy.
The practical upshot is that I have almost no money to spend on anything: fuel, food, purchased/rented entertainment... nothing. I've got supplies to last me a little while yet, so I'm not going to starve (thanks for asking).
But it's also been an interesting eye-opener.
I'm a writer. Which is to say, I want to make my living at spinning tales that other people will buy. I've got the raw "craft" part down cold, with grammar, punctuation, spelling, and so on. I've even advanced to the next level, where I can not only talk about "characterization", "pacing" and other scholastic writerly-things, but can actually demonstrate them in my own work.
All I need to do is have faith in my own ideas.
I've produced a lot of stuff that I've layered around the seed of ideas I get from someone else. There's no particular problem with collaborating on big projects, though I often take ego-hits from others as well as my inner heckler that they only give out Nobel Prizes for Literature to individuals.
Which might not even be true, and certainly isn't true for other prizes; Phil and Kaja Foglio have been jointly awarded Hugos, after all.
It's just the adversarial relationship I have with myself. "Who are you to even try? That's a stupid idea, you can't create an internally-consistent character or a society based on that" are pretty common jibes.
Wish I could come up with a better strategy for dealing with that.
Failing that, I wish I could find a way to earn a massive amount of money, so I could afford the kind of therapy necessary to help me deal with it.

Monday, April 20, 2015

So, I have a girlfriend, a job, a car and a place to live. Barring vagaries of fate, this will likely remain true for at least the next few months. Then, the girlfriend and I will move into a house, together with at least one or two other people, and things will proceed from there.
I've self-diagnosed as a high-functioning autistic; I can't count matches as they fall out of a box, but I can lose myself in writing (or tabletop RPGs, or books or movies or things like that) pretty easily... and I can barely manage to live a life on my own.
How do normal people manage to do more, to live more? Is it due to feeling less? I'm strongly in love with my girlfriend and love our too-infrequent-by-necessity sex. I can lose whole hours with a book in my hand, or a computer and keyboard, or even a notebook and pen if the writing-inspiration flows smoothly enough. Do I just need to channel that into something that will make me scads of money?